Minister Wavers on Plans to Burn Koran

Published: September 9, 2010

Sharif el-Gamal, the head of the real estate group that owns the properties where the project is planned, took a more definite position. “We’re not moving,” he said in an interview. He later issued a statement reiterating that.

In Gainesville, Mr. Jones seemed confused by the differing opinions. At first, after reporters read him Mr. Abdul Rauf’s statement denying that a deal had been made, Mr. Jones said he preferred to believe that the center would be moved.

He said he would be very disappointed if that did not turn out to be the case. As for whether he would go back to burning Korans, he seemed to go back and forth during multiple appearances before the news media. At one he said, “Right now, we are not even entertaining that idea.” But later he suggested he might reconsider.

Regardless of whether Mr. Jones does meet with the mosque leaders in New York, he has already elevated his profile, which has risen quickly from the small church he has run in Gainesville since around 2001.

The church has been fairly empty during recent services, with no more than a few dozen congregants, many of them family members. The smell of dust and mildew wafts out from the piles of used furniture that Mr. Jones sells on eBay when he is not preaching.

To most residents of this sprawling college town, where Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one, Mr. Jones has generally been a fringe figure, even last year when he put up a sign outside the church that said “Islam is of the devil.”

But that began to change when news of his Koran-burning plans reached Muslim countries about a month ago. Suddenly, there was an overabundance of what Mr. Jones seemed to want — attention.

Mr. Jones, a former hotel manager who calls himself doctor based on an honorary degree from an unaccredited Bible school, has at times seemed sincerely shocked by the response he has attracted. But not unhappy.

His church has been in financial trouble for years — the property is now for sale — and even before General Petraeus and the president made him a household name, he said in an interview that he hoped to become well known as a critic of Islam.

He was in his office at the time, alone, and to his right sat a drawing of a bearded man — a terrorist — that had been used for target practice.

The mix of guns and visions of grandeur would come to embody the church and Mr. Jones.

On Thursday, several of his parishioners carried pistols on their hips — the result, they said, of death threats. That also served as a sign of the outsize role their small group had taken on in world affairs.

By nightfall, things seemed no closer to an end, as a church member named Stephanie, wearing a pink shirt with a holstered gun at her hip, arranged for interviews with reporters from all over the world.